Plummy writing. Overripe Victorias. Every semi-colon is like a plum-stone in a plum-pie.
‘… One of the strangest notions I had formed (at least it seems one of the strangest now: I left Shalott a year ago) was that there is no such thing as a Bad Woman.’
Etc. etc. etc. I get into bed and read the whole rigmarole. It was written in an unseemly rage, the rage of the jilted lover. It was written too soon after Sheila went off with Andy. In fact I started it while I was recovering from the effects of the barbital. It is the work of a shellshock case. The whole world appeared to me to have been knocked askew and ugly by that one blinding explosion. But it was not the world that was askew, it was the mind that observed it. I can see now how unjust I then was, pretending there was ugliness and bitterness only in days which I now recall again were often ecstatically happy. And so the novel is no novel. It does not re-create the idyll. It is just my outpouring of rage when the idyll broke to fragments in my hands, like a shattered vase. It is the yelping of a kicked dog.
I get out of bed and tear the book into little pieces.
As I finish the kitchen clock goes into the prolonged antepartum travail which can only end in the birth of a chime. One o’clock already. No, twins. Christ, two in the morning. And I have to be up at seven.
I dive under the bedclothes again. The brass knobs at the four points of the compass make their usual cackling protest. Six for a man. Seven for a woman. Eight for a fool. Tonight I’m going to get less than five. And I can usually do with nine. What does that make me, I wonder? A pervert? Or just a lazy sod?
If only one could banish one’s anxieties. Will she be there?
Will she?
And if she isn’t, what matter? Half the human beings in the world are female. The breed is produced by the busload. Billions of the bitches. And every one stamped in the same press. Rigged on the same jigs. That sounds slightly suggestive, but Thou knowest what I mean, O Lord.
I ought to try counting sheep. But being me I can only count women.
Those tarts in Denny’s car. The one in red certainly had a pair of humdingers. Like coconuts. Soon to be brimming with milk. The one in yellow wasn’t bad either. More restrained of course, but—but Addison makes his points no less tellingly than Carlyle. More tellingly, perhaps, in the long run …
Oh, Sheila, Sheila, Sheila. Lying there moaning in the heather. My hand on your heart. My hand under your head. The odour of your hair and skin, as sweet as the heather. Your tense repeated cry: ‘No, Reggie, no. Don’t do anything we’ll regret—please.’
I got up and walked stiffly twenty feet away. I leaned against a damned great boulder, staring over bracken that basked in the heat to the sweeping blue smear of the distant sea. I shouldn’t have been so soft. In fact, I was a fool. I let her appeal to the Ivanhoe in me, the medieval Sahib.
The dream has a different me for hero.
Lena gives me a knock but there’s no need. I’ve been uneasily awake for an hour. Now the crisis is definitely upon me. I throw aside the bedclothes and sit up. The sky outside the window is low and grey. Poor flying weather. Possibly dangerous. I turn, shamefacedly, onto my knees. I adopt the posture of the Moslem as he kneels to face Mecca, burying my head in the pillow. I am not a Moslem any more than I am a Christian; I am in fact non-religious, except when I am afraid, or when I want events to take a certain course. Then I pray. I always despise myself for praying: I should be more self-reliant. But here I am on my knees. Head down I feel more self-abased. Head down I feel I am adopting a more courteous attitude to the God one normally never thinks of, but who may be there …
‘O God I pray Thee, I mean You’ (I despise these pulpit archaisms) ‘make me strong to face the perplexities of this day. I’ve never flown before: but what’s the point of telling You that, if You’re omniscient? And if You aren’t, it’s no good praying to You anyway.’ I sit up exasperated but on second thoughts burrow down again. ‘And if Sheila comes to the airport today, give me strength to face her like a man. And if she doesn’t come, still give me strength: I’ll need it.’ I pause for a moment. ‘Bless—no, that’s silly. Look after Mother and Dad, and Andy, too.’ More often I’ve commended him to the devil of late, but I don’t want to die, if the plane crashes, hating any mortal soul, least of all perhaps the elder brother I once worshipped. ‘Look after poor old Lena and send her a new lodger as soon as You can; she’s going to feel the pinch when I’ve gone, as of course You know.’ Another pause. ‘Bless Sheila. Protect her from all harm. Make her happy with Andy. If that is Your will, of course. Amen.’
Do I feel any better for—for throwing my burdens on the Lord, as my Father would put it? Frankly, no.
‘Are you coming, Mr. Joyce?’
‘Yes, Lena. Just going to shave.’
She is at the air-terminal before we are. As the taxi swerves in a half-circle across the street Lena cries, ‘There she is, in the doorway.’ My heart feels as if it has been plucked out of its ribcage and hurled full force against a brick wall. I look towards the great square porch but what with the taxi swinging round to a halt and the multitudes of skirts and trousers clotting into a frieze before eyeballs dazed with fear … I busy myself opening the door and holding it while Lena alights, lifting my luggage from beside the driver to the pavement, fumbling for the fare in my pocket. I drop a two-bob bit and have to stoop and reach under the taxi, a typical gaucherie; it fills me with fury; it seems I never can act grown-up under Sheila’s eyes.
‘My word, aren’t we smart this morning?’ Her voice is unflinchingly clear and authentic at my shoulder as I rise. ‘Riding around in taxis. And all these new bags too. Those on the pavement and those on the person. That suit really suits you, Reggie. You look more handsome than ever.’
My mouth opens and then it shuts, but no sound emerges. Cold and sharp and clear, like frost on a fallen leaf. Just as in the old days. But she’s gabbling a little too much. The flippancy’s forced. She’s frightened too.
Lena says, ‘You’re looking wonderfully well yourself, Mrs. Joyce. That costume is really beautiful.’
‘Thanks, guv,’ says the taxi-driver. So I can’t be preoccupied with him any more. I turn to face her.
‘Don’t you think her dress is lovely, Mr. Joyce?’ Lena’s face is bright with happiness because her high hopes have been justified; merely by coming here Sheila has indicated (Lena supposes) that she thinks more of me than I in my self-distrust thought possible.
I’ve got to say something. I still find it hard to focus my eyes on her. There are her face and that dress and her silk-stockinged legs and her blonde hair done up in a new way but I still can’t see them clear because of the layers of memories, all those months of desire, all those months of defeat, my boyhood veneration for Andy turned to hatred, and that night—that night when willingly and in peace I died by my own hand—coming between her and me. ‘It’s all right,’ I gulp at last. ‘But it looks—baggy.’ The word is the first that comes. I suppose it derives from her own pun on bags. It sounds dreadfully crude. I see her recoil. I add hastily, trying to make amends, ‘I mean, it makes you look—fatter.’
Lena gives me a reproachful glare—something she has never done before in all the six years of our fellowship—and takes Sheila’s arm with a sudden companionable gesture which says more plainly than words, Don’t mind him, he’s male and impossible.
Miserably I pick up the bags and follow them across the pavement, up the steps and into the shuffling, bustling vault of the terminal. Seen from the rear Sheila looks even less Sheila-like than from other angles. The scales of emotion have dropped from my eyes now she’s got her back to me. The hair that used to fall over her shoulders in a Danae shower of gold is now pruned and attenuated in a fashionable horse-tail that makes her look like a pinhead with delicate ears. Her figure which used to be so lithe and Atlanta-like moves heavily now on earth-bound soles; the goddess has gone out of her; the Word is made flesh. Here is the lumpy oaken chest that Andy forced open and rifled
of its treasures. She is now no more desirable than Lena, and a lot less pleasant company, I shouldn’t wonder.
The first desk has on a sign over it the words ‘ Swissair, Zürich.’ The clerk behind it is one of those scrubbed-looking, instantaneously polite people who always make me feel shabby and gruff. ‘Good morning, sir. Where are you for?’
‘Bangkok. Via Geneva.’
‘Ah, yes, sir. You want desk nine—at the far end.’
Sheila wouldn’t have looked at him, of course, far less stopped in hesitancy before him, looking waif-like and pathetic. She would have guessed in a flash that Swissair had two planes, one to Zürich, one to Geneva; her mind would not automatically have jumped to the conclusion, as mine, a pessimist’s, did, that there had been a slip-up somewhere, that I was going to be posted to the wrong address and miss my connection and get into all sorts of complicated situations where the inadequacies of my French would be made only too plain.
She isn’t taking any notice of me anyway, in fact she has her back to me. Lena is talking to her fast and low like an old intimate friend. The clannishness of these women! How many times have they met? About three times perhaps, on the occasions when Sheila consented to visit my lodgings for tea. Clearly they regard me as common property; I am owned in part by my ex-sweetheart, in part by my ex-landlady. Neither has in her heart that depth of feeling, overmastering, exclusive, destructive of peace and contentment, which I felt for one of them, which I still feel for her. In this climactic moment when I pass out of their lives for years, perhaps forever, they want to discuss her clothes. ‘Don’t you think her dress is lovely?’ Dear Lord and Father of mankind. I have wasted my passion on her.
I am passed through the mill in a few minutes. ‘Your ticket, sir? Thank you, sir … How many pieces of baggage? Only two, sir? We’ll just weigh them … Fifty-two pounds … Will you step on the scales yourself, sir? …’ Weighed like prime beef … ‘Thank you, sir. One hundred and seventy. Please pay five shillings over there. Yes, that’s all, sir.’ Another body disposed of. With an epitaph in pounds avoirdupois.
I pay my five shillings and wander back to the two women. They have stopped talking and standing as it almost seems shoulder to shoulder await my coming. Lena has a half-smile on her face but there is none on Sheila’s. She looks utterly different. Can a change of hairstyle do all that? Her features seem heavier, fuller, more—cow-like. The word appals me. Before it was all sylphs, nymphs, dryads, goddesses—a Daphnis and Chloe vocabulary. Her eyes have changed too: before like summer skies, blue and sparkling; now, ‘quivering within the wave’s intenser blue’, something beyond my understanding.
I realize that the onus of speaking first lies with me but out of the multitude of things which could be said, what is not either likely to lead to embarrassment or else sound trivial? Yet silence is an embarrassment also. It happens that we all start to speak at the same moment but hearing Lena’s voice too, Sheila and I both thankfully drop whatever it was we were embarked on: the floor is hers.
‘Have you arranged everything, Mr. Joyce?’
‘Yes, I—I think so.’
‘What happens next?’
Anything could happen—that is the hell of it. ‘The bus leaves in ten minutes.’ I see a shadow flick across Sheila’s face. ‘That’s not long,’ I reassure her. ‘Time to embrace. Or time to refrain from embracing.’ I feel base the moment I have spoken.
She gives me a hurt look and then says in a low voice, ‘Time to listen to one whole movement from the Oxford symphony, Reggie.’ Our favourite records, once.
‘Time for a cup of tea more like,’ says Lena and her voice is the voice of Juliet’s nurse croaking froggily, earthily, into the nightingale’s duet.
Well, the nurse is a great comfort to the audience and no doubt she was to Juliet too and we move off towards the white clatter of crockery and the hiss of vast silver urns with the tension on our nerves relaxed a little. Somehow I have come between the two women and I am walking (I suddenly realize) as a man symbolically should, erect and tall between mother and wife. But to round the group off I should have a little girl, my daughter, riding on my shoulder or carried in my arms with her own wound round my neck. The whole conception is complete in a flash—my next poem—and the fact that Lena is not my mother or anyone’s mother but one of Britain’s two million surplus women, the fact that Sheila is not my wife but my brother’s wife, carrying, not my seed, but if anyone’s, Andy’s in her—
The truth hits me like ball-and-mace on my unhelmeted brow. Of course, you fool, of course. That yellowish tinge under the make-up. That warmer, intenser luminosity in the once ice-brilliant eyes. The apparent bagginess of the costume
I stop and clutch her arm. Her face whips round and up at me, dread in her eyes.
‘Reggie, Reggie, please—’
‘Sheila, you’re going to have a baby.’
‘Well, what if I am?’ There is anger, not dread, in her voice now. ‘Let go of my arm, Reggie. You don’t want to make a scene here, do you?’
O God in Heaven. ‘Why did you have to come here this morning?’ I cry. And ruin my dream, or what was left of it?
‘Now, now, Mr. Joyce. I’m sure that really you’re very glad that Mrs. Joyce has come to see you off. I’m sure I would be anyway if I was in your boots. She’s feeling very poorly these days as you’d expect but all the same she’s come all the way up from Bantingham to see you, bumping and bouncing around in that bus, and she hasn’t even had a cup of tea this morning yet, and I’m sure you ought to be grateful to her, not—’
‘I don’t want him to be grateful,’ says Sheila angrily. ‘If only he could be just normal.’ She turns to me and her cheekbones have reddened. ‘But you seem to be more impossible than ever, damn you.’
‘Sheila!’ Surely she can’t mean that. I was never impossible. I was, if anything, too gentle with her, too malleable in her hands, too much court sycophant, coming when beckoned, leaving on the word of command …
‘I’ve told you before what he was like,’ she is saying to Lena. ‘The most spineless goddamned lover. If I snapped his head off he’d slink away all sorrowful and apologetic like a puppy that’s wetted the floor. Next day he’d be back again with some horrible poem about my right eyebrow or my left breast or something. How many poems did you write about me altogether, Reggie? Did you manage to cover all of me in the end? Do you still write poems about me?’
Laughing about me again. Just because of ‘Upon her Navel.’ Any mention of my poems always makes me feel red and resentful. I put my all into them; they are better than I am, by far; they are almost sacred writings. Sheila should be proud that she moved me to write some of my best but instead she is using them to jeer at me in front of Lena …
‘You seem to forget that I—I loved you, Sheila. I respected you.’
‘So did Andy. But he never wrote a poem in his life. He did what a lover should do—he made love to me.’
My anger blazes up. ‘And didn’t I, too? Before he ever came back from Kenya? Before you’d ever met him? Don’t forget our holiday in North Wales, Sheila. I haven’t forgotten it; I never shall. I wanted you as badly as Andy ever did, I’m sure. And what did you say to me?’ I imitate her female voice in the falsetto of my rage. ‘“No, Reggie, no. Don’t do anything we’ll regret—please.” Is that the truth or not?’
‘Of course it’s the truth.’ I start to speak again but she continues, ‘So you walked away and after a bit you came back looking all noble like Sir Galahad and no doubt with a new poem in your head and you said “Come on, we’d better be getting back down to Aber.”’
‘What did you expect me to do—rape you?’
Lena gasps. ‘Oh, Mr. Joyce—’
Sheila says, ‘Why not?’
Lena gasps again. I almost gasp myself. ‘Why not?’ I repeat uncertainly.
‘Yes, why not?’ She is speaking without anger now, expressing thoughts which are not thrown up by the instant’s emotion but which have been formul
ated in sessions of self-communion. ‘It’s a pity you don’t understand women, Reggie. You read all that poetry nonsense and you think it’s produced by the best and wisest men in the world but actually it’s all written by frustrates—shades of Byron and Lovelace and Donne!—who don’t know what they’re talking about. You’d do better to read one good textbook on sex. No girl wants to lose her virginity—that’s instinct—’
‘Really, really, Mrs. Joyce,’ cries Lena, looking nervously around to see if we are being overheard.
‘—but how can a young girl know what’s best for her? Maybe it would have done me good to be raped. Anyway you ought to have gone ahead, Reggie. I’d put myself in your power. But—you backed off.’
‘You mean, if I’d gone ahead—’
‘I don’t mean anything. I don’t know what I mean.’
‘But when Andy came, he didn’t—back off?’
‘I don’t want to talk about Andy. I want some coffee.’
We start to move towards the counter again but as we take the first steps the loudspeakers start to whirr and I know the moment has come. ‘Attention, please, ladies and gentlemen. The nine-forty bus is about to leave for London airport. Will passengers with tickets marked number five …’
‘Is your ticket number five?’ Lena asks me.
I nod. I hold out my hand to her. She struggles to take her glove off and I take her cold fingers with their arthritic joints and clasp them cordially. Her eyes suddenly fill with tears and I am astonished, grateful, jubilant, moved. It would be discourteous to make any comment. I prolong the clasp and then reluctantly break it and turn to Sheila.
‘Goodbye, Sheila.’ I hold out my hand to her.
For a moment I’m afraid she isn’t going to take it but then she does, holding her arm close to her body, not stretched out frankly like Lena’s. She doesn’t take off her glove and her fingers are limp in mine. I squeeze them. She doesn’t look at me.
A Woman of Bangkok Page 2
